You’re in an important meeting when suddenly, you notice something alarming …
There’s an elephant in the room
It’s not the first time you’ve seen it. It’s been hanging out on the sales floor, standing stiffly behind the counter, and even in the background of a Zoom call!
What is that elephant in the room?
- It’s the employee who lacks soft skills and constantly says the wrong thing at the wrong time.
- It’s the staff member you hired who doesn’t know how to resolve customer conflicts.
- It’s the team that simply can’t work together
It’s probably the issue you’ve tried to avoid because, let’s face it, how do you train the elephant in your workplace to develop better communication?
A recent LinkedIn survey found that almost 60% of leaders rated communication skills as a priority when it comes to employee development, along with other soft skills in leadership, collaboration and time management.
So before calling the SPCA, you might want to try a better approach.
Training Your Elephants
Integrate workplace learning into employee experience
We need to let our people learn, whether it’s part of their present job or a future aspiration and we need to empower them to do it. Workplace learning needs to be a ‘bottom up’ process that makes sure your team members are interested and participating in what's on offer, so that they don’t fall victim to training tune-out.
Learning becomes continuous, integrated into the day to day organisational culture - embedded into your team's day to day activities.
Everyday business communication skills are best developed through constant practice. Mixing various workplace learning strategies including online and face to face learning (called blended learning) will help strengthen those skills.
Get managers involved
You need to get your managers engaged in supporting learning.
The LinkedIn learning reported that 56% of employees would take a manager-suggested course. Developing their people and teams is a key management responsibility, and it’s what helps to keep their teams engaged.
With elearning performance can be measured - people like to know if they’re moving in the right direction and training material, completed online can be used to measure how well learners are progressing and what they need to work on.
Offer micro-learning
We all know that employees groan when offered seminars to develop their skills. Such courses can eat up a bunch of time on stuff that’s not relevant to what they need to know right now.
Long-duration seminars may dump a lot of information on participants but they don't have time to absorb or apply it. The forgetting curve is real. While short duration training is often ‘offered’ after work hours or during lunch ('Learn at Lunch' programs) to maintain productivity and work flows. This can drive a wedge between the employer and employee with the perception that employers don’t respect employees’ boundaries, or their need for personal time.
The solution: Offer learning opportunities in small, bite-sized time increments that are available when needed and manageably tucked into a workday. Google and YouTube have changed the way we take in information with digestible chunks that take into consideration our busy lives and shorter attention spans. Follow Googles' cue, with micro-modules that are relevant and available at the point of need, anywhere, anytime. Micro-learning is a think and it works.
ELearning provides a safe environment for learners to make mistakes, learning becomes less focused on getting the answers right and more focused on developing those crucial thinking skills.
What Training Elephants Can Deliver
A study published in Harvard Business review points to capability building in your teams leads to impressive business gains.
- Up to 20% increase in sales
- Up to 30% increase in profit
- Up to 7% increase in customer engagement
- Up to 15% increase in engaged employees
- Up to a 72 point decrease in staff turnover
- Up to 60% decrease in safety incidents
Skills training is one of the best investments in your business you can make.
With engaging, relevant and timely elearning micro-modules you can transform your people, your culture and your business performance for as little as a few dollars a year per team member.
This makes soft skills training a critical aspect in staff retention and a competitive edge over organisations who aren’t prioritising capability frameworks.
So the question becomes if you’re not developing your people, why not.
